


Connect (the communication is a liar's game remix)

by Runespoor



Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-15
Updated: 2012-04-15
Packaged: 2017-11-03 17:31:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/384051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Runespoor/pseuds/Runespoor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>R out. JD knows.<br/>Do not try to contact him.<br/>- B</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Connect (the communication is a liar's game remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mara](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mara/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Fathers and Children](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20821) by [Mara](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mara/pseuds/Mara). 



> takes place during the hand-wavy time where Tim wasn't Robin anymore due to Jack Drake finding out about it.
> 
> Thank you to S, for making this a better fic.

Batman’s orders regarding Tim, when they came, were short and to the point. 

Barbara received the instructions in the frustrating two lines of an e-mail that was only signed with the initial B, which he probably intended as business-like but she could only interpret as him evidence of him being an emotional coward. There was no good reason why he wouldn’t tell her through cam convos. He was upset and shit at coping, and in that sense it was business as usual. Barbara dealt with the frustration the way she usually did, first by cursing him while she read, then by taking it out on the operations of a drug lord who had nothing to do either with Wayne Enterprise or with the Drake family.

_R out. JD knows.  
Do not try to contact him.  
\- B_

*

Barbara remembered being Batgirl, often more than she wished she would; there had to be some downsides to a photographic memory, she joked with Dick, otherwise it would be plainly unfair.

When Tim looked away after Dick asked about his father, she was thrown back to a decade earlier. Memories of dawn over Gotham, and how the adrenaline crash dulled her senses and made the whole world slower and softer. Pastel slurry of polluted sky and her body lagging under it, the moment when she had to blink twice to keep her eyes open, and squint over the roofs to aim her grapple correctly. The shot of anxiety when she realized her father would be home soon (or getting up, if the night hadn’t been bad enough that the Commissioner needed to stay at HQ), and she should be in bed, because if he poked his head through her door and he didn’t find her, it’d be terrible.

She remembered the rush to get home before Dad, stumbling in through her window and knocking her knee (always her knee) on her desk, wincing at the noise more than the pain; hastily throwing herself into the shower and turning the hot water to the max.

“You’re up early,” her father would comment, quirking an eyebrow over the newspaper when she’d saunter downstairs, a towel around her hair.

“Had to wash my hair,” she’d reply, grinning, the ghost of exhaustion banished for the time, and Dad would make a noise in the back of his throat and wouldn’t ask any more questions.

For years Barbara took it to be the noise of “teenage daughters getting up at the ass crack of dawn to make themselves pretty.” She wasn’t offended. Dad never made disparaging comments, and she was too high on exhilaration to react.

She knew now he wasn’t fooled, not even a little, and she felt like she was watching her memories through a kaleidoscope lens. The cracks are obvious when you know what to look for, between the act she thought she was selling so well, and the truth of what her Dad knew was going on.

*

Barbara made a career out of contacts, juggling names and needs like Dick does jobs. She’d squeeze information from a stone, distill it into a powerful nectar that left her head clear and her enemies groggy and confused, tangled with the law precisely at the point she planned.

It didn’t do to tell her what to do or what not to do on that front. 

She didn’t even bother confronting Bruce in the reply she sent; in times of crisis, there simply wasn’t the time to tackle Bruce’s issues unless they stood directly against the course of what she and the others were trying to achieve. It was a little disheartening to realize how frequently crises came up, but Barbara forbade herself from entertaining another scenario.

_B  
Got it but need more info.  
What next?  
O_

Her fingers itched to type out the more explicit demand to keep her updated, but Babs knew from experience it wouldn’t pan out. He’d tell her in his own time - when and if.

Calling Alfred was the second item on her list; hopefully he’d be more helpful with information than Bruce. 

As she bounced her call so that it’d seem to originate from Milan, Italy, to anyone who might be tracking it, she accessed the meager handful of cameras she had looking over the Drake house. 

She’d had Dinah install them secretly back when Bruce Wayne was a murder suspect, under a vague pretext that touched upon general surveillance and which Dinah had taken as a symptom of either latent paranoia or hyper-vigilance. It was her only source of info into the Drake household; she hadn’t wanted to lie to Dinah to give her an excuse to plant similar equipment inside, and she didn’t consider for one moment that her other agents might not tell Tim about it - not Helena, and certainly not Dick.

The vision spreading on her computer screen didn’t ring any alarm bells at first glance. The comings-and-goings she glimpsed beyond the closed windows were nothing out of the ordinary for Bristol. 

She might have been looking at any upper-middle-class family on a week end; teenage son sprawled on his bed flipping through a book or a magazine, parents in the living room, stepmother with a newspaper open, perhaps suggesting a family outing, father present - but distracted, glance flicking to the door of the living room and more surprisingly to the window.

In an ordinary, suburban family, it’d just mean the father was concerned for his son. Sensible, given Alfred’s tale, unlike other ordinary suburban families, Jack Drake had uncovered a better reason to worry than Tim’s near-perfect school grades.

After she thanked Alfred and hung up, Barbara stayed watching. She knew the people on the screen; Tim was a friend, through the masks and lies they’d put up in front of each other’s eyes. They had the same interest in privacy, often they’d laugh as the same things. Yet now she felt a disconnection; as if the screen was a wall, unable to reach through like a spectator at the theater. 

Jack Drake started pacing, striding steps that took him nowhere, enclosed in the walls of his beautiful house. Dana cocked her head - Barbara could see her lips move, asking what was on his mind. Jack stopped pacing, raked a hand through his hair as his chest heaved with a painful sigh, and shook his head. 

It was a script Barbara could’ve written herself unfolding under her eyes, the repeated acts of lying she’d witnessed countless times. 

Her eyes slid back to Tim’s room, where he was still reading, apparently unaware of the outside world. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Dana stand up and press a comforting hand to Jack’s arm, and Jack’s answering smile. She could’ve zoomed in, but she knew without doing so it wouldn’t reach his eyes.

In the bottom right corner of her screen, Jack and Dana Drake embraced. They were like dolls cloistered in a dollhouse, and she was the little girl who’d slid the fourth-wall panel off to reveal the innards.

Tim flopped on his bed, arms crossed behind his head as he stared at the ceiling.

Without closing her windows, Barbara opened a blank e-mail (untraceable, as prudence dictated), typed a single line, and sent it to all three of Tim’s relevant e-mail’s addresses; the one he’d used as Robin for dealings with the rest of the family, the one he’d set up for his exchanges with Oracle only, and the civilian one.

_IN CASE OF EMERGENCY: JLA9_

She would’ve waited for him to open the e-mail, to be sure he’d received it if for no other reasons, but another of her screens started flashing, and a voice tentatively called for her in the mike.

_“Um. Oracle? Your friend told me to talk to you? The blonde lady?”_

Barbara pushed a button and enlarged the screen - there seemed to have been no explosions yet, which was unusual. 

“Oracle,” she confirmed, in a metallic voice.

*

“Babs? Everything okay?”

Barbara stilled to prevent herself jumping, and curled her lips into a smile. It’d look a little forced, no chance of fooling her father, but she wasn’t trying to; it was the thought that counted. Just to show that she wasn’t so down she couldn’t regroup.

“Everything’s fine, Dad.”

Jim nodded. He looked neither convinced nor suspicious, but simply like he trusted her to take care it.

Sometimes Barbara thought back to all these years her father had played the fool as she tried to hide who she was from him, and she wondered who was more relieved that the lie didn’t stand anymore. Maybe that was the secret behind adulthood; the moment when your parent knows that you’re in trouble but knows that you’re competent enough to deal with it, and to ask for help if it gets too much. It made her wonder, fleetingly, how people who weren’t crimefighters - or cops, or vigilantes - sent the same message. Did civilians have similar signs of trust?

“Okay. I was thinking we could go see that Cagney retrospective next week end, if you’re free.”

“I’ll try to fit that into my schedule.”

What else could she say? ‘My other family is falling apart, Dad, and I don’t know how to prevent it.’ Yeah, that’d go over well.

He chuckled lightly, and let it go, the conversation drifting to the links between the mayor and the Gotham Knights. In another family, it might’ve been small talk. For them, it was still talking shop, idle though their tone was, and Barbara let herself be absorbed by the conversation. She was comfortable, there, discussing corruption and Gotham with her father, wrapped in the topic like she’d wrap herself in a worn, familiar sweater.

*

She hadn’t expected Tim to write back, and he didn’t. Instead, the cameras she’d put around Tim’s house were returned to her shortly after.

“O? You still there?” Stephanie’s voice came through the intercom as clearly as if she was in the room, and Barbara leaned back in her seat, closing her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose with a sigh. She must have lost track of time staring: the tiny buttons of the camera lenses kept looking at her from the inside of her eyelids, black and round. “I got held up talking to Procjnow and Burke, sorry!”

For a moment, she toyed with the idea of Steph entering the Drake household when no-one was there, and peppering it with surveillance devices. 

Oracle had never kept as close an eye on Robin as she had on Nightwing, the Drake house fuzzy in the corner of Oracle’s tentacular perception, more obscure to her than the Cave itself. 

It had little to do with Batman’s damn territoriality issues (Oracle had cameras in the Cave), and more with being accepting of Tim’s-- skills. Or maybe his issues. Things they both knew well enough to recognize in one another, at any rate. By not putting cams in his house, Babs was extending him the respect she’d have for another herself.

She never missed it before, never minded the blindspot where one of the family lived. Never particularly needed an eye there, and always assumed that she’d simply be able to use the existing equipment if she ever needed to intervene. Now that the possibility was forbidden to her, she was suddenly aware of the absence, the blank in her web of information, less an itch than a scab, dull like dead flesh.

The beetle-black plastic of the camera shells seemed to eat the light when she touched one with a fingertip, rolling a couple of inches before hitting the angle of her keyboard. The model was somewhat obsolete; she should’ve upgraded the security with a newer batch. Had Tim found out about their existence from the start? Was it Bruce who’d removed them, after it was clear Tim would listen to his father, or Tim himself?

“No, seriously, O? Did you hang up on me? Cause I’m nearing the rendez vous point and no sign of Batgirl.”

“I’m still there. Sorry, Robin.”

Steph laughed, light and Robin-sharp. “Don’t worry about it. Just get my partner, okay? I can’t find her on the intercom.”

“Why, Robin, are you worried?”

There was a snort. “Worried she’s not gonna leave me any bad guys, more like.”

“I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, don’t take any initiative until I give you the okay,” professional conscience forced her to add. 

“Roger!”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

“Aw, come on!”

Barbara smiled in the greenish glow of her screens, and pushed the issue out of her mind as she attempted to locate Cass. It wasn’t as if she was going to be entirely blind to whatever happened inside the Drake house; computers came equipped with mikes and webcams, after all. She’d just have to make do.

*

Detectives Procjnow and Burke belonged to the Major Crimes Unit of the GCPD; they were under the authority of Maggie Sawyer and had both been hand-picked by Commissioner Gordon himself when he’d decided to create a unit dedicated solely to crimes involving costumed villains - “freaks”. Metropolis PD had tanks, equipment that more than a couple crimefighters would’ve envied them, and Superman in their city; the GCPD had an information network monitored by Oracle. Welcome to Gotham. 

No-one’s a worse gossip than a cop, but Gotham cops were a class of their own.

Technically, Jim Gordon was retired. He no longer had clearance to know a lick about the police’s internal affairs.

In practice, the MCU cops were as loyal to him as if he’d been their mother, and his friendship with Batman was an open secret. Two of their number had met a new Robin; Barbara didn’t give it forty-eight hours before her father was informed of the fact. And even then, the delay would be because no-one wanted to think about the reason for a new Robin. No-one fancied being the bearer of possible bad news.

Despite carefully crafted rumors, she wasn’t omniscient. But when her phone rang a couple of days later and the caller ID flashed ‘DAD’, she knew why he was calling before he said a word.

“Hi, Dad,” she greeted him.

“Babs,” her father started over her words, urgent, then stopped when he realized her tone didn’t match any of the worst-case scenarios he’d imagined. 

A pause dragged on. The silence must be turning uncomfortable, on the other end of the line. (She could picture her father’s hand clutched around the phone in a white-knuckled grip, but she dispelled the image as if it were smoke.) It didn’t affect her, though. No reason to, she was just answering her father’s phone call. (She silenced the wry British voice that mentioned compartmentalization.) She was poised and perfectly calm, removed as though underwater; waiting patiently for her father to start again. (Was that how Bruce felt when someone breached his barriers? It explained why he let them ramble themselves out.)

She chose not to think about the ice lodged in her lungs (what if he speaks up) and the copper at the back of the throat as though she’d been screaming (wishes she didn’t dare put into words, please don’t speak up) and the possibility that he might throw plausible deniability to the winds, pop the bubble-wall between the different parts of her life, and ask her straight on what was going on with the Batfamily, acknowledge that she knew them, was one of them. (Was that how Bruce felt?)

Barbara focused on the video footage the League wanted her to check for signs it’d been tampered with - Lexcorp, funnily enough. They suspected Savage’s intervention, so far Oracle had found nothing that disproved or confirmed the theory.

He coughed. “Are--are you all right?” The last word wavered, vowel stretched faint. 

“Yes,” she replied, without an instant’s hesitation. 

Too fast.

For an instant the conversation froze, suspended over the razor’s edge of a cop’s instinct. Barbara found she couldn’t breathe for fear of sending it toppling, into the vast aridity of a landscape flattened with nuclear warheads, desert as far as the eye could see, void of any hiding place. Schrödinger’s Slip-Up.

There was a sound like Jim was taking a breath. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. You know--well.” Each word sounded like stone chipped away from a statue, with a sculptor’s efforts. “I’ll call you later, honey.”

Eroded granite; he sounded old.

“Call you, Dad,” she echoed.

She wheeled herself to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea, pouring four spoons of honey to smooth away the rawness in her throat. Then she came back to her comms and it was like her eyes had never misted over at all.

*

Monitoring the Drake house was a basic security measure she wished was still available to her. Spying on Tim, though--she had to stage a minor uprising. 

Later on, she’d never be able to remember who had been the first to throw around the idea, her or Bruce. They’d been talking on her computer, she could pull out the record of the discussion to find out, if she wanted to. She didn’t. 

Their moral crisis was shamefully short-lived.

Bruce’s position was as usual virtuously unassailable, a hypocrite’s wet dream. An assassin was going around, murdering boys fitting the former Robin’s physical description; Bruce’s sense of filial duty rebelled at the thought of going against Tim’s father; but it was for Tim’s own safety; anything less was unthinkable; they had to watch out for him; no-one could ever know. From afar, and making sure Tim stayed in the dark. They couldn’t interfere with his new life.

Bruce left the conversation content that he’d taken the best possible decision, despising himself for it, and as the object of Barbara’s wrath. 

She shared Bruce’s apprehension about Tim’s safety, and second-guessed what other motives she - they - could have. She might have gone to Dinah for a sympathetic ear if she hadn’t been one hundred percent certain the reaction would include the word “vicarious” at some deadly turn in the conversation, as in “so you’re afraid you’re doing this to experience Tim’s life vicariously?”

*

Checking directly on Tim in any significant manner failed. He’d known what to expect and had stuck a band-aid over the eye of his computer’s cam.

*

She called the Drake house after the second night in a row Dick fretted to her about Tim’s adjustment to civilian life. If she couldn’t keep an eye on him any other way, she might as well con the person responsible for Tim’s estrangement into doing her job for her. 

The family computer was turned on in the living room, and the webcam feed had a good view of the room. She called just as Drake walked past the phone.

Waiting for him to pick up, Babs breathed through her teeth, startled at the sudden onslaught of vindictive thoughts that crossed her mind. She wanted to strike at Jack Drake in his own home and drag his doubts into the light, force him to acknowledge that he’d torn Tim from family, put him in front of the gaping divide between him and his son, and shove him down that ravine. May he break his bones and his heart.

Her breath caught when she heard his voice. The first few minutes were decisive, the difference between a contact successfully established and Drake hanging up on her and cursing her to the nth generation. 

She had to cajole; she had to share vulnerabilities to build a rapport, so he’d trust her. She had to give her name to someone who had no idea who she was or what it’d mean that she told him he could call her Oracle.

"Mr. Drake, I just want to help you understand your son."

On the other end, Jack Drake was struggling.

“Why are you doing this?”

_Because Tim needs Robin as much as he thought Batman did._

That’d probably be the worst thing she could say. Barbara pressed her lips together, flipping through her catalog of reasons, until she found one that the man on the phone would be compelled to accept.

"Because I wish someone could do this for my father."

Through the angle of the webcam, she could see Jack Drake’s shoulders tense, and relax. 

People think that if they’re silent they don’t reveal anything about themselves; it’s untrue. What someone is willing to listen to says almost as much as the words they’d speak. 

She knew she’d won even before he told her to go on. And if it was bitter and sharp-edged, it was no less of a victory.


End file.
